Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday October 13, 2009 @01:52PM
from the particle-that-doesn't-want-to-be-discovered dept.

Reader Maximum Prophet sends a piece from the NY Times by the usually reliable Dennis Overbye reporting on a "crazy" theory being worked up by a pair of "otherwise distinguished physicists": that the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson. Maximum Prophet adds, "This happened to the Superconducting Super Collider in the science fiction story Einstein's Bridge. Now Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, are theorizing that it's happening in real life." "I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

What is particularly annoying is its relation to the fannish distinction from a few decades back. Science fiction was abbreviated "SF" and pronounced "ess-eff". "SciFi" was pronounced "skiffy". SF was things like _the Foundation Trilogy_. SciFi was things like _Son of the Giant Toad that Ate Chicago_. "SciFi" could also be used as an adjective: "That movie/TV show is EXTREMELY skiffy".

its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Yeah, leave something like that to Hollywood. In the movie version, the LHC would travel back in time to kill its grandfather, but would miss instead killing the Tevatron. Hilarious shenanigansor a car chase (probably both) would ensue.

... (some time between fall '63 and spring '65) I wrote a short story with a similar premise:

The government's physicists had identified a way to create such a "bounce" situation by a nuclear mumbo-jumbo that starts with putting together a dense enough energy packet. This backs the universe up a bit and it takes another alternative timeline. Humans have just enough psi to make different decisions. The more energy you use to start the process, the farther back the "time bounce" to the fork. Or at least that's the theory.

The government has taken advantage of this by creating a secret project: They are collecting and storing a LOT of energy using a solar power satellite. (The downlink is a laser and the ground-based collector and energy storage tech, like the details of the bounce device, are unspecified.) Accumulation of energy is ongoing, so they continue to have enough to bounce back at least to the time when the project was initiated. (Going farther risks taking a fork on which the device is not made.)

This is used by the diplomats as a way to correct mistakes: If things got too bad diplomatically they could go back and try something different. (Unlike a doomsday device you WANT to keep this one secret - and for there to be only one.)

Since the project went online, though there have been many conflicts and near-misses on situations with the potential to degenerate into something that would make WW II or a comet impact look tame, things have always worked out for the government in question. Sometimes by smart diplomacy, sometimes by smart battle strategy in small conflicts heading off large ones, sometimes by seemingly amazing coincidences and blind luck. Starting as one country on Earth (where the device is still sited) the government has (mostly peaceably) unified/absorbed/explored/grown into a multi-solar-system empire.

The kicker is that, from the viewpoint of the operators (from which it is was written) EVERY use is the FIRST use. It ALWAYS appears that things have miraculously gone so well that they haven't needed it - until JUST NOW. Maybe the thing really doesn't work - in which case it will destroy the planet and life on most of the spiral arm. Maybe it does work - but from the viewpoint of the current timeline it's just the end of the universe. Maybe the diplomats and generals, knowing this is a possibility, have gone to heroic efforts and pulled out heroic saves - until JUST NOW. But now it's finally hit the fan and the viewpoint characters have been ordered to set it off...

One of the others in that class was the guy who was the model for Aahz in Asprin's books. Ran into him a decade or two later. He brought up the story and said it had haunted him ever since. B-)

Awesome! Great stuff, and don't worry I once wrote a followup to Morte d'Arthur perfectly in the style of the original on which I received a C- for parts where my grammar and structure matched the original work but apparently were "incorrect" to the teacher... and then I won a National English Merit award for the same work when the teacher's assistant submitted it because she dug it. Grade never got changed.

I had a high school english teacher who gave me a C+ on a book report on The Time Machine [wikipedia.org] because I failed to mention the nuclear war... that occurred only in the 1960 movie version, not the book.

In retrospect, this should have been self-evident to the teacher, since the story was written in 1895, before Bohr suggested there was even such a thing as an atomic nucleus in 1913.

What if certain "extraordinary" people are merely beneficiaries of dumb luck? What if Warren Buffett has no actual investiment skill, but appears so because we never put him in the context of the many thousands of similar individuals who eventually "landed on tails", so to speak?

I understand that there's a theory in investing that a significant fraction of investment advisers are precisely that. B-)

There's also a confidence game that works that way:

1) The con artist starts by extracting a large number of names and addresses from the phone book.

2) He send them each a random stock pick or horse race winner.

3) After the race/target date he discard all the names he sent a bum pick and repeats with the remainder and a new set of picks.

4) After a few iterations he has a handfull of people who are convinced he's psychic or has inside info, some of whom already traded/bet on his calls and are richer than they were before he started. (The number if iterations is significant but I don't recall it. It's got to be long enough to hook the suckers and short enough that the news of the losers doesn't propagate. USPS and the racket squads are aware of this system.) Then he sends a letter asking for a big fee for the next pick. This brings in a pile of money.

5) He sends each of 'em who pays up another random pick. If they're all flops he's still got the pile of money. If one or two hits he now has one or two suckers who are even more convinced and have a bunch of money to fleece with one more iteration.

From the outside perspective, the scientist was never able to achieve time travel, and the proliferation of nasty accidents around time travel experimentors would seem like some sort of "Physicist's Curse".

There was something that LOOKED like that in chemistry: The isolation of Fluorine. It turned out to be pretty straightforward. But the stuff was SO toxic that a number of chemists died in "mysterious laboratory accidents" before one succeeded AND kept it sufficiently contained to live to tel

Does it explain why, if the Universe is so loath to produce a Higgs boson, it bombards our atmosphere when enormously high energy particles that can create Higgs bosons if they exist? Why hasn't it propagated back in time to stop cosmic rays? It sounds far more like fiction, and inconsistent fiction at that.

So I can tell my wife that I cannot cook dinner tonight because the result would be so abhorrent that nature might send an agent back in time to destroy me before I can create it. Ergo, any movement toward making dinner could very well result in my demise...so let that be on her conscience.

Actually, if you go ahead and tell your wife that, it may just be that one of your descendants would just be so abhorrent that the universe decided you should not be allowed to breed, and this is the method it's using to enforce that.

You can tell her, but she'll probably stop listening after "because," at which point she'll begin recalling everything you've ever done wrong, and start reeling them off in a run on sentence not unlike this one, taking the collective, including your most recent attempt to get out of making dinner, to mean that you don't love her, which raises the question of why you're even together, except that you obviously just want your needs satisfied while she does EVERYTHING, and you don't even care.

Either that or she'll just start making dinner without saying anything, in which case you're in *real* trouble. If so, DO NOT EAT THE FOOD, because it's probably poisoned, but also don't let her know that you're not eating the food, because it will only be taken as an insult to her cooking and further enrage her.

I am truly humbled by your words, StikyPad. We cannot permit your wisdom to be restrained any longer!
You must go to that Siren that has ensnared you, and proudely proclaim that you will once again wander the Earth, for the Slashdotters need your words!
(And if she likes, she can tag along, but it's Fast Food from here on out.)

It was completely over the top for humour value. No one is taking this seriously. No one in their right mind anyway. So there's no secret agenda to oppress women here.

The same women that complain about these jokes as being sexist usually have no problem with jokes about men. Get a grip. I'm a fat guy but I still laugh at some fat jokes. It's called having a sense of humour.

...the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one...

You're only thinking in three dimensions. The concept is that the universe doesn't end when the Higgs boson is created, it's that the universe cannot take on a structure such that an event affects one that precedes it.

Yeah I realize I said "see the universe end". But I'm not thinking three dimensionally, and thus "was never allowed to be" is not in any way a better answer.

I think if you extend that to four dimensions, you sort of get this outcome: anything that causes a particle to move backwards through t

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

and another that could possibly be relevant here (imagine this one as one line per page, as published):

He found a practical application for the effect in "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" (named in honor of Frank Tipler's paper). The universe hates time machines... so one side of a war works to convince the other side to try to make one.

I'm my own grandpa.I'm my own grandpa.It sounds funny, I know,But it really is so,Oh, I'm my own grandpa.

Now many, many years ago, when I was twenty-three,I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be.This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red.My father fell in love with her, and soon they, too, were wed.

This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life,My daughter was my mother, cause she was my father's wife.To complicate the matter, even though it brought me joy,I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.

My little baby then became a brother-in-law to Dad,And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad.For if he was my uncle, then that also made him brotherOf the widow's grown-up daughter, who, of course, was my stepmother.

Father's wife then had a son who kept him on the run,And he became my grandchild, for he was my daughter's son.My wife is now my mother's mother, and it makes me blue,Because, although she is my wife, she's my grandmother, too.

Now if my wife is my grandmother, then I'm her grandchild,And everytime I think of it, it nearly drives me wild,For now I have become the strangest case you ever sawAs husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa!

I'm my own grandpa.I'm my own grandpa.It sounds funny, I know, but it really is so,Oh, I'm my own grandpa.

It's OK, the summary is only anthropomorphizing Nature, which doesn't mind being anthropomorphized at all. It's mass-imparting, universe-annulling particles that Nature abhors. Unless of course Nature IS a Higgs boson, in which case we should be very worried about living in a self-loathing, suicidal universe that is only kept intact by the fact that if it didn't stay intact, we wouldn't be here to notice.

If the universe were indeed so much more complex than we imagined (which I fully believe is possible) that something like this could happen, I still don't think it would happen this way - that the future universe is coming back in time, just to break some magnets. Nature is rarely so subtle.

I do believe in the possibility of multiverse theory being correct, which also allows me to believe in some form of time travel, but a more natural extension of this all is that the particles created in the future tear a hole in time-space and destroy the collision center of the machine, not some magnets around the edge (unless an accidental collision occurred elsewhere, i suppose).

Plus, I've never figured out if time-space would follow the earth in its orbit, or if these things would just happen out in space somewhere, at the spot in orbit the earth was going to be at.

I really hope this is kind of correct, or the universe would be a much less interesting place. I fear that one day we'll figure everything about this stuff out, and that it won't be a magical world of multiverses and time travel.-Taylor

i think it's less like the future leaking back to prevent the present, and more like the present just isn't capable of reaching the future we expect.

it's like the first time you ever put two little toy magnets together, north pole to north pole. not really knowing anything about them, you think they might stay, but one flips as soon as you take away your hand. try as you might, there is no way for you, as a child, to keep them together effectivel

That's what they did with the tower of babel. They didn't have space all figured out just yet so they just gave everyone some encryption. Also, when the hubble came out, they didn't have deep space done quite yet. (They did, but it was having some rollover errors.) So they decided to break the mirror a little bit.

...but did you notice no one mentioned that it is simply hard to create the conditions necessary to detect the Higgs boson? We too quickly opt for the sci-fi answer and though the idea of time based sabotage is fun, it makes for a better movie than it does an answer. And how was such a conjecture published without data or peer review? Nothing to see here, next particle please...

[quote]the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson[/quote]

Let's apply Occam's Razor. One of two cases must be true, either:(a) "the Large Hadron Collider's difficulties may be due to the universe's reluctance to produce a Higgs boson"or(b) building a machine like this is rather complicated and it might take a few goes before they get it right.

Of course, there could be an option (c) they really suck. I'll try that on my boss the next time I fuck something up. "No, see, it's not that I'm not any good at my job, it's that the universe is conspiring against the proper completion of the project. Have I ever mentioned Schroedinger's Cat?"

by John Gribbin, (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, 105(2):120?125, Feb 1985). In that story a powerful particle accelerator seemingly fails to operate, for no good reason. Then a physicist realizes that if it were to work, it would effectively destroy the entire universe, by initiating a transition from a cosmological false vacuum state to a lower-energy vacuum state. In this story, the explanation of the failures assumes a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. So instead of explicit backward causality, there is effective backward causality: only the branches of reality with equipment failures contain observers; therefore, observers can only experience histories with equipment failures. The effect is the same.

I also discussed this idea in the context of novel models of computation in my MIT Ph.D. thesis, Games, Puzzles, and Computation [mit.edu] (section 8.2; also published as a book by A.K. Peters). The idea was a bit similar to Nielsen and Ninomiya's proposed experiment. It turns out that by connecting an accelerator capable of destroying the universe to a computation depending on random numbers, one could in principle solve problems that are otherwise intractable. I termed this "doomsday computation", as a variation on the similar concept of "anthropic computation" proposed earlier by Scott Aaronson.

It turns out that by connecting an accelerator capable of destroying the universe to a computation depending on random numbers, one could in principle solve problems that are otherwise intractable. I termed this "doomsday computation"

Duke Nukem Forever: A brilliant physicist spending his days masturbating pauses to download the latest copy of Duke Nukem Forever only to realize it's the worst game ever made. Unable to 'unplay' the game, he sets his mind to developing a way to travel back in time in order to prevent himself from playing the game and instead spend his time doing better things (like masturbating). Unless Duke Nukem Forever can never be released due to unexplainable problems!

Hurd: A revolutionizing operating system is delivered to MIT's labs only to allow the physicists 100% computational up time and serious efficiency. Unplagued by BSODs and kernel panics, the lab flourishes to the point of developing a way to time travel. Unless Hurd is development is never completed!

Steorn's Free Energy: Currently a large hurtle in faster than light travel is the energy required to move the tiniest amount of mass at that speed. Steorn's perpetual motion machine would have provided that energy... unless their debut in London fantastically flopped and stymied them resulting in an international laughing stock.

ReiserFS: Had nothing to do with potential time travel, Hans just got out of control and killed his wife.

If the activation of the LHC created some kind of cataclysmic event which would some fuck up time to the extent of violating causality, and if the universe does indeed have causality as a boundary condition, then there are far more probable ways of averting the fatal collision than screwing up several tonnes of magnet months before the high energy firings were scheduled to take place.

The universe could simply induce a sufficient e/m force to stop the proton beams colliding. It wouldn't take much, on a cosmic scale, and would be a far more likely outcome than an entire macroscopic object being foobared just to protect the continuity of the universe.

That misinterprets the theory, by falling for the news author's anthropomorphism on the universe. The theory isn't that the universe is actually a conscious being that throws a wrench in the works and makes the LHC break just in the nick of time. The theory really is that in every multiverse where the LHC works correctly, the multiverse is destroyed by the abominable bosons. We are all riding through a series of universes in which the LHC repeatedly fails to work. At each point where a quantum event occurs which eventually leads to the LHC either working or failing, the universe splits and our consciousness follows the branch where the LHC fails, because existence is extinguished in the other branch. Is this somehow more solidly believable than the author's "sentient universe messing with stuff" explanation? Probably not.

"The theory really is that in every multiverse where the LHC works correctly, the multiverse is destroyed by the abominable bosons. We are all riding through a series of universes in which the LHC repeatedly fails to work."

But that semi-sophistry could apply to any conservation law or forbidden transition:

Put on your spooky voice and say "The creation of a particle in a configuration which violated conservation of momentum would cause such a Disturbance In the Force that it would wipe out the whole of the Universe, so we are sailing in a sea of universes selected from the Master Multiverse for which only momentum-conserving outcomes just happened to take place".

More reasonably, physicists say, "Some transitions are forbidden due to conservation laws" and there are observable consequences. This is normal physics.

It's the other way around. The universe "does" nothing. It merely prevents certain scenario's from happening. You might think of the current situation as one of infinitely many parallel universes. That we're currently slashdotting in the one were those magnets happened to fail, does not mean that that is the only scenario happening, it merely means that we happen to be in that universe, in that timeline. In other timelines they're probably discussing why a meterorite happened fall exactly on the LHC;-)

If the universe is going to prevent this machine from working, it's going to do it in the way that requires the least "effort" from the universe's perspective. This is probably something much different than what would seem to be the simplest and easiest from a human perspective.

The universe doesn't have limbs. It doesn't act with muscle. Fundamentally, it acts with probabilities. The universe is also the master of time, not the slave of time as humans are.

I have to point out that this is merely superstitious thought; there is no evidence to indicate that this is the reason why the collider failed, and while the theory *is* possible, it defies rationality. The simplest/most obvious explanation is the the collider simply failed due to technical reasons due to flaws in design or construction. Anyone could tell you that. Saying that it didn't happen because the Universe simply didn't allow it is the same as if you just substituted "God" for the word "Universe." Why didn't X happen? God didn't allow it. Why did Y happen? God made it happen. I'm not saying that it's wrong to believe in God, but these "explanations" are really non-explanations.

This is ridiculous and not worthy of any publication, let alone the NYT (and should not be propagated on slashdot, imho).

In short, the Higgs boson (if theories are correct) is a scalar that provides mass to all particles. That means it is present at all times everywhere. So, although it is tongue in cheek, we are swimming in an invisible soup of Higgs particles at each moment. To say that universe doesn't want us to create one is like saying people are born blind because the universe didn't want us to experience light.

How chauvinistic! But of course, who but a human would think that a human's mind would be so powerful that the mere observation of a revealing "secret" of the universe would be a threat to it?

Honestly, this is beyond illogical. It may be a fact that the universe thinks and is aware of itself, but to think that it would be protecting itself from humanity learning about it in some way is ludicrous when presented with the infinite number of other ways it could restrict humans from discovering the Higgs boson.

Let's instead consider a more plausible scenario: The LHC is an enormous undertaking that goes beyond any attempt of artifice made before involving particle collision and it is very likely it will have many setbacks.

Look at it this way. If the number of (one-syllable-name + one-letter) rappers and hip-hop artists continues to increase, then eventually all possible names will be taken. So, unless that trend fades, someday there will be a fresh new urban act called "Goat C". Fate, twisted master that it is, will make this person famous. Just in time for you to have kids or possibly grandkids. And they will ask you if you've seen Goat C, because he's awesome.

And then you will be horrified.

Then the TV ads will start about how Goat C will be appearing live at your local arena. You won't be able to tune it out like other ads, simply because of the surprise the first time you hear it. Every time you hear the baseline that opens the ad, every time you hear his music, everywhere you turn, you hear people praising Goat C or exhorting you to pay money to see Goat C.

Then he will make a remix of your favorite song. So your favorite song will be forever linked to Goat C.

might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather."

I don't think so. Entanglement. One particle goes through the event horizon. We stay on this side and observe what happens to the other. Some say the energy of the black hole breaks the entanglement. But how will we know till we try it?

Information (except its mass, charge, and spin) can't escape a black hole, period. You don't even need to suspect that some difficult concept could plausibly be an exception, because you know there are no exceptions.

A physicist will be able to explain better than I can why entanglement can't be used for information transfer (such as FTL or what you describe), but my simplistic understanding is that in order to observe the spin on the particle, you have to actually observe it, and by observing, you might alter its spin. You have no way of knowing whether the spin you just observed is a legit signal, or a bunk one induced by your measurement.

Any signal transmitted becomes indistinguishable from a random number generator

A pair of entangled particles has the property that, if someone takes a measurement on each of them, forcing each into one of a pair of eigenstates, knowing which state one of them collapsed into tells you which state the other one collapsed into - even if the separation between the two measurements is spacelike rather than timelike (i.e. even if a signal from one of them "telling" the other which state to pick would have to propagate faster than light.)

But you can't force your particle to pick one of the two options for its own collapse, and thus force the other to pick a state of your choosing and send a bit of information faster than light. The PARTICLE gets to make the pick. You can't distinguish whether the particles communicate FTL, the pick was already made when they initially became entangled and carried by some "hidden variable" until the measurement (though there's reason to believe it's not a hidden variable), they were just predestined to act that way, or whatever. (Physics says WHAT it does but, at least so far, not HOW.)

The most you can do is measure a DIFFERENT thing about the particle when you force the collapse (such as the polarization along a different axis if you're measuring polarization), in which case you lose all knowledge about how the other particle's measurement came out.

So if there is an FTL communications link there, it's useful for the particles but apparently not for us.

This is probably good. If we had a reliable FTL signal link we could pretty trivially (using special relativity and things moving moderately fast) turn it into a future-to-past communication link and blow the hell out of causality. So far the only maybe-future-to-past comm channel that comes out of current paradigms (AFAIK) involves galactic-scale masses and energies.

The difference between theory and practice is that nothing in the universe actually conforms to your perceptions and everything you know is not even wrong. You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.

Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know, nor will it ever really matter - if you cannot even know your "self".

"In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is". I paraphrase this as:

"To the imagination, it is identical with reality, when Reality is so totally comprehensive that all of imagination is an infinitesimal subset."

But the mind is a little thing - with such a limited set of tools and perceptions, on such a tiny scale.

You are not even really "you" in any sense beyond the illusory narrative created by the mind, to order its disparate sensations.

That depends very much by what you mean by "illusion", and what you mean by "you". If I identify myself as this particular chunk of matter in the state it is at the moment, then yes, I am me.

It's like describing a program as an illusion. In the sense that it abstract, perhaps. But it does have real, physical consequences -- at the very least, the color of the pixels on your screen (or which ones are lit by how much, if you want to be pedantic).

Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know... Reality is so totally comprehensive that all of imagination is an infinitesimal subset.

Perhaps. What is your evidence for this?

It seems to me that we are refining our understanding of reality, but the subset which we do understand, we understand fairly well. It has been a very long time since we've been truly and profoundly wrong -- and even then, we weren't.

For example: It was once believed that the earth is flat. But even this is not particularly wrong. On the scales most of us deal with in day-to-day life, a flat earth is a good approximation.

It was once believed that the sun revolved around the earth. This is still a good approximation, for most purposes here on the ground. It is only when we begin to consider the motion of other planets that it becomes important which is which.

People often point to Newton being "disproved" by Einstein, as a way to show how "unreliable" modern science is -- usually in an effort to promote some non-science, such as religion or "Intelligent Design". What they miss is that Einstein was, for all practical purposes, a refinement of Newton -- the Newtonian equations are at the core of the relativistic ones, and most of the time, we still use Newtonian physics, because it's still a good approximation and is easier to calculate.

So while I agree that there is always more to understand, we shouldn't pretend we know nothing simply because we don't know everything.

So, going back to what you've said here:

Black hole? Maths say they exist - but you will never really know,

In the sense that I can "really know" anything beyond the internal consistency of mathematical and logical systems, I can know that black holes exist, until a better explanation comes along. And as I've shown, that "better explanation" probably won't look that different than the one we have now.

For example, it is possible that we are wrong about what the singularity of a black hole looks like. But it seems unlikely that anything would ever make its way back out -- and if it did, it probably would not come back the way it went in. Even if black holes were shown to be an entirely different phenomenon, it seems unlikely we'd show that it isn't somehow swallowing up matter, energy, even light.

Conjecture on your part, based upon your observations and your personal interpretation of those observations. Whether or not he (or I) ever die is a distant mystery to you and doesn't matter; you should be more concerned with your fate.

See, perspective and philosophy is fun to play with. And my reply to your post is as inane in irrelevant to the subject matter as your reply to the parent was.

If information theory wants to stop us from observing a higgs boson then we won't be able to observe it in the experiment. What won't happen is that every time we try to test it some mechanical component breaks down. That's ridiculous.

Kdawson's name is on this, why am I not surprised. I don't mean to troll, but wow does that editor have some interesting stories to his/her name. I mean honestly, a bonified, "time travel is killing the LHC", story?

Actually you kind of are trolling, because that's not what this article is. This is not a "time travel is doing something" article, it's a "two otherwise respectable scientists are saying something pretty crazy" article. And that is notable, because that does not normally happen.-Taylor

You could say that the universe is forever splitting into infinitely many versions every instant, or that the wave function of the universe is getting infinitely more complex every instant... these are just different ways of saying the same thing. The different macroscopic events (you pull the trigger on cartridge or an empty chamber) are the result of these quantum level events, not t